Users, land up this month on OpenSim grids

OpenSim active user numbers hit a new high of 34,908 users this month.

Land area also went up and is now at the equivalent of 80,175 standard regions, reversing a couple of months of declines. However, it still falls short of the 88,225 regions last November.

Much of the movement is also administrative and doesn’t reflect actual growth or losses. For example, Metropolis removed around 3,000 inactive regions out of its database from its grid map, many of which are likely to return once their owners realize that they’ve been disconnected.

In addition, several grids did not report stats in previous months but did report them this month, including Atek Grid and Gevolution.

And Discovery Grid began reporting total land area, not just the number of named regions, resulting in an apparent increase of 3,783 regions on that grid.

Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

OSgrid is still is the largest grid in total land area with 19,852 regions, followed by Kitely with 17,335 regions and Atek Grid with 6,947 regions.

There are 1,278 grids in our database in total, with 263 being active and 189 reporting statistics this month, down from 199 grids last month.

These stats do not include most of the mini-grids running on the DreamWorld distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids. DreamWorld has counted more than 5,000 mini-grids created with this installer alone so far.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

You can also add your grid in the stats if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. OutWorldz also provides OpenSim users with free mesh items, OARs and free seamless textures that you can download and use on your grids.

Popularity

When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is: the busier, the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience… you get the idea.

Hypergrid-enabled worlds continue to dominate the charts, with DreamNation the only popular world not on the hypergrid that reports its traffic numbers.

DreamWorld stats

The Hypergrid Business database currently tracks 1,278 grids, of which 263 were active this month.

OutWorldz has another system for tracking grid counts, and has currently counted a total of 5,170 Dreamworlds or grids created with the DreamWorld software owned by OutWorldz. The DreamWorld software allows users to easily create and run grids at home as well as to connect to other OpenSim grids.

Out of the 5,170 Dreamworlds, 4,156 are private and 1,014 are hypergridabble.

Exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables since Kitely turned the hypergrid export functionality, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.

Gloebits transaction volume grew 20 percent in three months

The value of transactions in Gloebit network increased by 20 percent in three months and to reach a new high of over two million Gloebits, while the number of user accounts went up by 18 percent to more than 1,400 up since October. The number of app users is now more than 2,000

Number of transactions and users up in Gloebits network. (Gloebits Data.)

VirTec struggles to keep merchants

VirTec, a network of vending machines that work on multiple grids and support a variety of currencies, reported that their revenue remained fairly the same in December and January while the number of merchants fell slightly, from 38 to 33 during the same period.

The volume of transactions was 676 transactions.

Merchant and revenue data at VirTec network. (VirTec data.)

Digiworlds and ZetaWorlds to host birthdays next month

Digiworldz will host a third birthday bash from 10 a.m. Pacific Time on March 3. It will feature live performances from Merkabah Oh, Lucky Chiung and Lite House as well as djeeing with DJ Sofee, Samantha and Rique among others.

Land purchases at the grid’s Oceanside Estate region will be matched with another region to the Ocean to allow owners to sail their boats and fly their favorite planes on.

Kitely Market Fashion Expo is now a permanent sim

Kitely Fashion Show is now a permanent sim. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

Kitely is inviting all designers who sell avatars, fashion items, accessories, skins and hair, and jewelry on the Kitely Market to become part of the project by exhibiting on the new Kitely Market Fashion Expo sim. The sim is now ready for anyone willing to take a store. They will get a goodies box with items to use in customizing their stores. 14 shops have been set up so far, Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business.

There will be a live fashion show on a regular basis where they can exhibit their items. The first one was held one February 11. The goal is to bring together fashion community and helping people get legitimate items to dress their avatars.

Those interested can request for exhibitor privileges can contact Kitely fashion show expert Lorelai Seetan or Rosa Alexeev in-world using this link.

The address for the sim is grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Market Fashion Expo.

Metropolis improves privacy policy ahead of new regulations

Aqua Dark region on Metropolis grid. (Image courtesy Metropolis.)

A new regulation goes into effect this May — the European General Data Protection Regulation — which applies to any company doing business with European citizens.

Its current privacy policy has been in effect since 2009, and meets some of the new requirements, but the grid is updating it to be fully up to date. That includes getting specific opt-in consent for information, and a multi-lingual explanation of cookies used on the site. Consumers will also be able to get all their data deleted on request.

“The Metropolis Privacy Policy in place today already conforms to much of the requirements,” grid co-founder Lena Vanilli told Hypergrid Business. “Where even more accurate information is required, the policy will be improved. We will set up a special contact area on privacy where a user can inform himself about the stored personal data. Furthermore, requests for cancellation could be made directly.”

The grid says it will be prepared for the new regulation come May when it comes to effect.

“Since privacy is very important to us, we will soon nominate a designated Privacy Officer, who will also act as a direct contact partner and will be available for all questions regarding data protection and general security,” she added.

There is also another regulation that grids need to be aware of, she added, which went into effect at the start of this year — to collect Value Added Tax.

Metropolis does not itself sell or lease any regions or objects, she said. This is instead done by Hypergrid Virtual Solutions UG — and that company does meet all legal requirements including those relating to payment of national VAT for all EU countries, she said.

Sci-Fi Expo starts at Tangle grid

Sci-Fi expo at the Expo Isle in Tangle grid. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)

The Sci-Fi themed expo started on February 5 and will go on until March 5 where anyone can showcase space-themed regions or products.

“The site will be available to participants, builders and merchants as of next week, so they have time to get things ready until opening,” Tangle’s head of media relations, Elbereth Elentari, told Hypergrid Business.

Participants from other grids are welcome, said Elentari.

“I have reached out to the space or sci-fi themed regions around the hypergrid,” she said.

The hypergrid address is: tanglegrid.net:8002:EXPO Isle

AviWorlds back with $100 regions

AviWorlds, which is back up online again, is trying out a new business model of creating value for land renters by charging a $200 set-up fee and a monthly rent of $100 for a 15,000-prim region.

There will be one or two regions per server only and each region will have more than eight gigabytes of RAM for usage. The move will create a balanced land business environment, AviWorlds grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business, and because not everyone will afford or want to buy a region, the market is pushed to land parcel market.

“As you can see in Second Life most people or about 99 percent rent smaller parcels,” he said. “Very few own regions. If a grid offers cheap region prices it disrupts the land business and its value. That’s the problem in most OpenSim grids. A grid has to create its uniqueness and a desire for people to want to be part of that specific community.”

Kitely’s starting price is $15 a month for a 15,000 prim region and its most expensive region is $40 for 120,000 prims and four gigabytes of RAM. That region can also be configured as a 16-region megaregion.

According to Pomposelli, very expensive land will provide more stability to a grid’s business model. However, AviWorldz itself has shut down ten times since it first launched in 2011 — and that’s not counting temporary outages.

“I have studied this formula for over eight years and by the way it was my very first business model,” he said.

Meanwhile, some of the oldest commercial grids in OpenSim have very reasonable prices — at least, when compared to AviWorlds. InWorldz has been around since 2009 and its regions start at $40 per month.

New OpenSim LSL Editor released

A new LSL Editor with extended OSSL functions has been released to allow users to easily and seamlessly write, edit, compile and debug LSL syntax codes for OpenSimulator and Second Life. With the new version 2.56, users can create scripts or objects with scripts inside them.

The testing and debug functionality is much better than that of the built-in LSL editor in OpenSim viewers. It works on Windows 2K, 2003, XP, Vista, 7, and 8, said LSL Editor developer Frank Rulof.

“It has extensive testing and debug functionality, in fact you can test your scripts or sets of scripts and their interaction to a very large extend outside the grid , the debug support is also much better then the in-world script editor,” Rulof told Hypergrid Business.

The OpenSimulator Scripting Language (OSSL) includes several useful functions not available in standard LSL, including instant teleports.

“The previous LSL Editor supported only LSL functions, which means that you could not use the editor if you wanted to use OSSL functions so now scripts with OSSL functions will compile and can be tested and debugged,” he said. “I don’t know if the built-in editor supports OSSL in all viewers, for Singularity, it does.”

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.

And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at [email protected]. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be under-counted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.

February Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,278 different publicly-accessible grids, 263 of which were active this month, and 189 of which published their statistics.

David Kariuki is a technology journalist who has a wide range of experience reporting about modern technology solutions. A graduate of Kenya's Moi University, he also writes for Cleanleap, and has previously worked for Resources Quarterly and Construction Review. Email him at [email protected].

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